Title: End of the Fucking History

• Humanity is now experiencing the collapse of a scientific social contract which began the late 20th century, and the looming breakdown of our collective modernist ambition, expressed in the unstoppable force of climate and ecological catastrophe.
• The West is experiencing the post-mortem of the last great patriarchal myth - the cathartic clash between Good and Evil ceremonially concluded by neoliberal dominance as pronounced by Fukuyama.
• The most significant outcome of this myth is the accumulation of global power in Silicon Valley, and its bastardization of the social and scientific victories of the 20th century to create a global hegemony where
  • technology = the ultimate good that exists above us
    Replaces L. Mumford's
  • technics^[1] = the multi-faceted thing that exists among us
• A post-Fukuyama humanity is in dire need of a new myth - but the pool of modernist patriarchal mythology has dried up. In the transitional period when the men of SV cling on to power with increasingly intensive surveillance and ideological warfare, the lack of mythology was compensated for with Fisherian hauntology.
• But this Haunted Era could only last forever if Fukuyama was right. Spoiler alert: He wasn’t.

Prophecy: Vaporwave will be cancelled by a womxn

• In the late 2010s we see a powerful resurgence of witchcraft, divination, astrology, and other occult practices in internet culture
• But this resurgence isn’t relegated to a neoliberal “special interests” bookshop section or unwelcoming festivals and societies run by wealthy white folks, which was largely the case in the 90s, and largely in the “West”
• Instead it is embedded in the Internet, it festers within it.
• Public fora such as Twitter have become spaces for dark, and often brutal rituals (see the “cancelling”, the “doxxing”, the “brigading”, ...)
• The pervasive Haunted presence has conditioned a new generation to accept the deeply ideological complexities of the Internet at face value. Examples:
  • Necromancy is normal - Tupac hologram, Carrie Fisher in Star Wars IX
  • Astrology is accepted (“I don’t actually believe in it, but I do kind of believe it”)
  • The death cult^[2] of Extinction Rebellion is an appropriate response to the zeitgeist

But why is the Internet so mystical if it’s just a bunch of computers connected to one another?

Theory: There are real and intentional manifestations of the occult in the Internet, not just on it.

• Amazon Echo, Google Home
  • Hidden, distributed, intangible Cloud entity
  • Remote presence
  • Fixed location in a household - a shrine for access to the Cloud entity
  • Triggered by invocations
• Google Maps
  • A transposed representation of the planet Earth
  • Astral plane travel
  • A place of rest for the deceased, the ancestors
  • Triggered by invocations
• Instagram Filters
  • Ceremonial masks
  • Expressing affinity to a subculture, an identity translated into neo-collectivist network terms
  • Giving up on the neoliberal notion of self-perfection, by expressing a transcendental, digital self
• Instagram Filters
  • Lil Miquela, Bermuda
  • Unlike human influencers, these beings can transcend the limits of aging and basic human needs; the confines of gender, sexuality, class and race
  • They are the Cloud’s attempt to create objects of worship, modelled to be pleasant/woke in a superficial, market-friendly sense

How do we start discussing this phenomenon, let alone incorporate it in a progressive political, theoretical or artistic practice?

Admission: all contact with technics is political, and all encounters with the Cloud are spiritual^[3]

• In mathematics, the study of Complexity is a field exploring systems which behave in emergent ways - i.e. small changes in their initial state cause huge differences in behaviour. These differences are hard/impossible to predict (even if deterministic).
• Complex systems are often shown as an example of the limits of human scientific understanding of the universe. The limits of ability, of control.
• What lies beyond these limits and is considered to be unknowable, undiscoverable, is branded supernatural
• The way humans engage with such a supernatural sphere is through spirituality, religious or occult practice
• The Internet has scaled up to become such as complex system long ago. What’s happening now is large swathes of its complexity are abstracted away behind esoteric front-ends
• This is because such front-ends are easier for user-workers to interact with, given the complexity of the underlying systems. This enables the user-worker to generate more profit for the manager of the system, who does not actually fully control it^[4]
• The “managerial” role in this narrative, as described by Adam Curtis^[5], is fundamentally priestly or ecclesiastical - the institution of the priest depends on maintaining the unknowable.

Potential: ???

• In these bullet points, I am unable to make any proposals beyond echoing Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism manifesto
• a combination of deliberate short-circuiting, reverse-engineering, and ghosting of the surveillance-capitalist complex
• an effort to enlarge the cracks in the wall - of gender, of the self, of the monetisable identity
• if Silicon Valley built itself upon a sacrilegious colonialism upon the Occult of the people, if their fortunetelling is a commodified mockery of our practices
• then we must reverse the routing - and sacrilegiously practice our Occult in the codebases and repositories of Silicon Valley